John Barth - The Sot-Weed Factor

"Tayloe! Ye've heard o' Tom Tayloe and me?"

Ebenezer explained the circumstances of his acquaintanceship with the corpulent seller of indentured servants. McEvoy was vastly amused; indeed, he laughed as heartily at the news of Tayloe's indenture to the cooper William Smith as if he were hearing the story in Locket's instead of a prison-hut, and the Captain was moved to observe, "Methinks 'tis he should be merry, not you, sir; he hath the better bargain after all!"

"Aye and he hath," Ebenezer agreed. "But e'en were we not here in the very vestibule of death, 'twould ill become us to jest at the man's bad luck."

McEvoy laughed again. "What humanists death hatches out of men! Ye have forgot what a worthless wretch Tom Tayloe was, that preyed on masters and servants alike!"

"A wretch he might have been," the poet allowed, "and deserving of your prank; but his time is no less mortal than our own, and to rob him of four years of't is to carry the jest too far." He sighed. "I'Christ, when I think of the weeks and years I've squandered! Precious mortal time! I begrudge every day I spend not writing verse!"

"And I every night I slept alone in London," Bertrand said fervently.

"As for that," the Captain put in, "what matter if a man lives seven years or seventy? His years are not an eyeblink to eternity, and de'il the way he spends 'em — whether steering ships or scribbling verse, or building towns or burning 'em — he dies like a May fly when his day is done, and the stars go round their courses just the same. Where's the profit and loss o' his labors? He'd as well have stayed abed, or sat his bum on a bench."

Although Ebenezer stirred uneasily at these words, remembering his state of mind at Magdalene College and in his room in Pudding Lane, he nevertheless reaffirmed his belief in the value of human time, arguing from the analogy of precious stones and metals that the value of commodities increases inversely with their supply where demand is constant, and with demand where supply is constant, so that mortal time, being infinitesimal in supply and virtually infinite in demand, was therefore infinitely precious to mortal men.

"Marry come up!" McEvoy cried impatiently. "Ye twain remind me of children I saw once at St. Bartholomew's Fair, queued up to ride in a little red pony cart. ."

He did not bother to explain his figure, but Ebenezer understood it immediately, or thought he understood it, for he said, "Thou'rt right, McEvoy; there is no argument 'twixt the Captain and myself. I recall the day my sister and I turned five and were allowed an extra hour 'twixt bath and bed. Mrs. Twigg would set her hourglass running there in the nursery; we could do whate'er we wished with the time, but when the sand had run 'twas off to bed and no lingering. I'faith, what a treasure that hour seemed: time for any of a hundred pleasures! We fetched out the cards, to play some game or other — but what silly game was worth such a wondrous hour? I vowed I'd build a castle out of blocks, and Anna set to drawing three soldiers upon a paper — but neither of us could pursue his sport for long, for thinking the other had chosen more wisely, so that anon we made exchange and were no more pleased. We cast about more desperately among our toys and games — whereof any one had sufficed for an hour's diversion earlier in the day — but none would do, and still the glass ran on! Any hour save this most prime and measured we had been pleased enough to do no more than talk, or watch the world at work outside our nursery window, but when I cried 'Heavy, heavy hangs over thy head,' to commence a guessing game, Anna fell straightway to weeping, and I soon joined her. Yet e'en our tears did naught to ease our desperation; indeed, they but heightened it the more, for all the while we wept, our hour was slipping by. Now bedtime, mind, we'd ne'er before looked on as evil, but that sand was like our lifeblood draining from some wound; we sat and wept, and watched it flow, and the upshot of't was, we both fell ill and took to heaving, and Mrs. Twigg fetched us off to bed with our last quarter hour still in the glass."

"Which teaches us — ?" questioned McEvoy.

"Which teaches us," Ebenezer responded sadly, "that naught can be inferred to guide our conduct from the fact of our mortality. Nonetheless, if Malden were mine, I'd set Tom Tayloe free."

"But in the meanwhile I may laugh at him all I please," McEvoy added, "which — philosophy be damned — is what I'd do in any case. D'ye want to hear my tale or no?"

Ebenezer declared that he did indeed, although in fact his interest in McEvoy's adventures waned with every speeding minute of the night, and he felt in his heart that his digression had been considerably more germane to their plight.

"Very well, then," the Irishman began; "the fact of't is, I had at first no mind at all to come to Maryland. When Joan Toast left me I knew we were over and done — 'tis her wont to give all or naught, as well ye know — yet no folly is too immense for the desperate lover, nor any contrary fact so plain that Hope cannot paint it to his colors. To be brief, I feared she'd follow ye off to Maryland, and in order to intercept her I took lodgings in the posthouse, put on my grandest swagger, and gave out to all and sundry I was Ebenezer Cooke, the Laureate of Maryland. ."

' 'Sheart, another!" Ebenezer cried. "Maryland hath an infestation of laureate poets!"

" 'Twas a wild imposture," McEvoy said good-humoredly. "Heav'n knows what I meant to do if Joan Toast sought me out! But in any case my tenure was wondrous brief: I had scarce raised a general toast to the Maryland muse ere a gang of bullies burst in with some tale of a stolen ledger-book, and being told I was Master Eben Cooke the poet, they straightway hauled me off to jail."

"La, now!" laughed Bertrand. "There's a mystery cleared, sirs, that hath plagued me these many months whene'er I thought of't! When I came to the posthouse to hide from Ralph Birdsall's knife — that I wish I'd suffered, and been a live eunuch instead of a dead one! — what I mean, when I asked about for the Laureate, I heard he'd been fetched off to prison. 'Twas that very tragedy inspired me to take his place and flee to Plymouth; yet when Master Eben found me on the Poseidon, he vowed he'd ne'er been set upon by Ben Bragg's men and thought me a liar. Doth this news not absolve me, sir?"

"No fear of that," replied the poet. " 'Tis too late in the day for aught but general absolution. There are some small lacunae yet, as't were, in the text of your pretty tale — but let them go. What did you then, McEvoy? I pray you were not held long for my little theft."

"Only till the following morn," McEvoy said, "when Bragg came round and saw he'd hooked the wrong fish. By then I'd lost my taste for farther nonsense; I resolved to quit my search for Joan and commence the mighty labor of forgetting her. I returned to my old pursuits among the wealthy, but though I had some small success at first, my years with Joan had spoiled me: the ladies felt a small scorn in my rutting, belike, or heard some certain coldness in my voice. . In any case I was soon unemployed and anon was driven to lute it on the street-corners for my living, by Botolph's Wharf and the Steel Yard, and Newgate Market, where my life began. What I earned I spent on whores, to no avail: when a man hath lain a thousand nights with his beloved and no other, he knows her from crown to sole with all his senses — every muscle, every pore, every sigh; every action of her limbs and heart and mind he knows as he knows his own. Put some other wench beside him in the dark: her mere displacement of the air he feels at once as an alien thing; the simple press of her on the pallet is foreign to his senses; her very breathing startles him, so different in pitch and rhythm! She puts out an ardent hand: his flesh recoils as from some brute-o'-the-forest's paw. They come together: i'Christ, how clumsy! — their arms, that would embrace, knock elbows or can find no place to lie; their legs entangle, that would entwine; their chins and noses will not fit. He would caress her: he pokes her ribs instead, or scratches her with a hangnail. Some amorous word or gesture takes him by surprise: he is unmanned, or like a green recruit, shoots his bolt ere the issue is fairly joined. In short, though he hath been to his beloved a master lutesman upon his lute, now he finds he hath bestrode a violincello, whereof he knows not gooseneck from f -hole; he hits no string aright, fingers blindly to no purpose, and in the end hath but a headache from his plucking."